CROWDED PRISONS REACH A MILESTONE

TRACY 
California prisons marked a milestone Friday, when officials said they had removed the last of nearly 20,000 beds that had been jammed into gymnasiums and other common areas to house inmates who overflowed traditional prison cells.

Inmates in rows of double- and triple-stacked bunk beds became an iconic symbol of the overcrowding crisis, Corrections Secretary Matthew Cate said in announcing an end to the practice.

“It symbolized, I think, a system that was so crowded it could not work effectively or efficiently,” Cate said at Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy, 70 miles south of the state capital in Sacramento.

Crowding was so bad at the California Rehabilitation Center in Riverside County in 2005 that it was hours before guards discovered an inmate had been killed in his bunk in a makeshift dormitory.

Since then, federal judges have forced California to radically change the way it houses criminals. The prison population dropped by nearly 19,000 inmates after a new law took effect in October that sends less-serious offenders to county jails instead of state prisons.

The state has nearly 142,000 inmates but must shed 17,000 more inmates to reach the June 2013 court deadline to reduce crowding in its 33 adult prisons. The federal judges ordered the state to reduce its inmate population as a way to improve inmate medical care, which was so inadequate that judges ruled it violated prisoners’ rights.

The overflow beds once held more inmates than the entire prison populations of 25 other states, according to national statistics for 2010, the most recent available.